Real-time delivery of media, and other data intensive services, over the Internet has great commercial potential but has thus far found little market acceptance. Most streaming media and other forms of real-time multimedia delivery such as video conferencing are presently fringe offerings and suffer unacceptable quality to elicit payment by subscribers to such services. The recent proliferation of high bandwidth end-user equipment, such as digital subscriber line technologies and cable modems, demonstrates the consumer demand for broadband services. Increasing market acceptance of virtual private networks demonstrates corporate desires of economical, high-performance private networking. Even with high speed subscriber connections to the Internet, users generally find real-time high bandwidth media offerings provided over the Internet to be of dramatically lower quality than traditional media, e.g. telecast, cable, satellite, etc. Improved quality of streaming media and other real-time applications are being made as telecommunication carriers upgrade backbone and switching networks. However, some quality problems with respect to quality of service deliverable over the Internet is inherent in the Internet Protocol (IP) itself. Particularly, the Internet relies on a best effort packet switching network layer. Thus, media transmissions made over the Internet are susceptible to losses or delays due to preemptive, higher priority transmissions. Latency issues are a primary concern when dealing with the quality of Internet delivered media.
Various protocols have been designed and have addressed different quality of service needs. One of the most well known and widely adopted is the asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) protocol. ATM is a connection orientated technology that can integrate voice, video and data into packets (also called cells). Because it is connection oriented, any data having a common origination and destination will be transmitted over the same path. While this may present problems, such as a path outage due to a node failure, quality of service guarantees can be implemented in ATM over specific paths.